* Peter da Silva <pe...@taronga.com> [2005-10-17 18:35]: > On Oct 17, 2005, at 9:26 AM, A. Pagaltzis wrote: > >Prior to Unicode it was quite customary to do what they did, > >too. > > Only for idiots. There's not enough room in 8-bits to fit all > the special characters they need, so they end up doing escaping > or font-switching anyway so they went incompatible for no good > reason.
It was unclear whether you were calling the inclusion of extra characters idiotic, or the invention of incompatible charsets in order to express them. The former is, but before Unicode, inventing new 8-bit charsets that were ASCII + a bunch of whatever characters were considered necessary was something everyone did. Hence 15 different tables in ISO-8859 and the dozens of DOS codepages (like 1252 which is a superset of ISO-8859-1), plus MacRoman, etc pp. I’ll disagree that it’s idiocy to include extra quote characters in the character set so that you can actually express quotes according to the grammatic rules of each language and the typographic standards that have existed for centuries, instead of being limited to this Anglo-Saxon-only (and then *still* hobbled) ASCII thing. But we seem to disagree a lot with each other, so I shall try to refrain from replying to you in the future; we’re on the list to hate on software, not each other. Regards, -- Aristotle Pagaltzis // <http://plasmasturm.org/>
